Blog

30-Oct-2011 I Is For Indigo

It’s also for interest and interim – both relating to jiva-penned songs.

Remember we mentioned our very own ‘Old Fashioned Christmas’ that we’ve entered into an online Christmas Song competition which offers prizes for the top 3 best songs/recordings, but also has a bonus prize for the song that gets most plays? In spite of lots of people telling us they love the song, it seems increasingly difficult to turn that into clicking an internet link and playing the song… for those interested in statistics we can reveal that we are currently in 7th place.with 135 plays. Last week we were 5th with 93 plays – even though we’ve slipped in the rankings we want to say a genuine and heartfelt thank you to those who have played the song… and to those who’ve not yet indulged we’d like to say…

No, we didn’t actually go to Hawaii – the filming took place ‘on location’ in our Blue Room… you can probably tell we’ve been experimenting with chroma key to create a transparent background for video. Lot’s to learn, but it’s great fun dabbling and increasing our knowledge and experience.

Iis for Incompatible… or Incredible… Following the demise of our PC which we use for music recording, we decided to go for a laptop solution this time – performance and potential for portability were prominent purchasing pointers (dang! we’re not up to P yet!). In the past we’ve found Dell laptops to offer excellent performance and reliability at a reasonable price (P again!), so they were our first port of call. But which model? Latitude? Inspiron? Vostro? Precision? Alienware? XPS? After much indecision and an incredible amount of investigation we plumped for an XPS L502x – 15.6 inch widescreen, Intel i7 2nd generation Sandy Bridge processor, 2Gbyte nVidia graphics, 750 Gbyte hard drive, Windows 7 64-bit… an impressive configuration, easily up to the task. Sure enough, it arrived on the due date and we set about installation of operating system, drivers and application software. Windows, tick. External m-Audio Ultra interface, tick. Digital Audio Workstation… uh, oh! “Incompatible with this version of Windows – please install a different OS or purchase an updated version of the software.”

We’d been so intent on the hardware side we hadn’t checked the software requirements! Ah well, more investigation and internet searching ensued – we now have three options… upgrade to the next version of the software, uprade to a newer product which has totally replaced the software we use, or shell out mega money for Pro Tools (at last available for Windows 7, previously only worked on Macs)? Decisions decisions.

If you’ve not seen Slava’s Snow Show, then do so… go see it… it is the most improbable, indescribable, ingenious and incredible piece of theatre. We could talk about mime, music, lighting effects, laughter, tears, balloons, snow, interval, idiocy, insanity, incongruity. It’s impossible to imagine the impact of the show by reading a review or looking at photos or videos… you have to be there, in the moment, a part of the spectacle. We’ve now seen it three times and, if they toured the UK every year we’d see it again and again, every year.

Our next few scheduled appearances are shown below... details of these, and later gigs, are on our Gig List page. Additionally, we regularly pop in to residents nights and singarounds to do the occasional floor spot.